Our CTO Patrick Jackson was the reporter's guide to the secret life of his iPhone - he called Patrick the "data breaker"! What Patrick showed the world, wasn't a surprise to us, but the results have been pretty eye-opening for many. On the reporter's phone:

Many popular apps - including Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel - were tracking the reporter's data even when he was asleep!

We recorded 5,400 hidden app trackers in a single week.

We also discovered that tracking requests wasted 1.5 gigabytes of data in a month.

Several popular apps had embedded tracking that the users and even the app developers(!) would never know about without a tool like ours.

In the article, Patrick stated Disconnect's view perfectly.

“This is your data. Why should it even leave your phone? Why should it be collected by someone when you don’t know what they’re going to do with it?” says Patrick Jackson, a former National Security Agency researcher who is chief technology officer for Disconnect. He hooked my iPhone into special software so we could examine the traffic. “I know the value of data, and I don’t want mine in any hands where it doesn’t need to be,” he told me.